Napkin

A persistent scratch surface for your computer.

Napkin is somewhere to put things before you know whether they matter. Paste text and images into it; nothing needs a name, a folder or a tag. Everything stays on this machine.

The icon is a crumpled napkin, which is the whole idea: you write on one without deciding first whether it is worth writing on.

Status: early development (0.1.6), Linux and Windows. Expect rough edges. Windows is newer and less used than Linux; macOS is planned, not started.

What it's for

The gap this fills is between the clipboard, which forgets, and a notes app, which asks you to file things.

• The paste you will want in ten minutes. A token, a container id, an ssh command, the error you are about to search for. It does not deserve a file and it should not have to fight for the clipboard.
• A debugging session's screenshots. Grab, paste, keep grabbing. They sit next to the log lines and the stack trace instead of piling up in ~/Pictures under names like Screenshot_20260923_070305.png.
• Links to deal with later. A URL on its own becomes a chip you can open, and it stays searchable by its address.
• A scratchpad per task. One napkin for the ticket you are on, another for the one you were interrupted by. Neither needs a title, and neither has to be filed when you are done.
• The things you are not ready to name. A draft paragraph, a half-formed idea, a quote. Napkin exists to postpone the decision to organise, which is the decision that usually stops people capturing anything at all.

It is deliberately not Evernote, Notion, Obsidian or OneNote, not a task manager, and not a clipboard-history tool — your OS already has one of those. There is no AI in it: it never summarises, categorises, names or tags anything. See SPEC.md §1.

What it does

• Napkins, not documents. Ctrl+N gives you a fresh napkin. Paste onto it, type on it, and move on. Nothing asks for a title.
• A board, not a page. Items are cards, laid out in columns that widen with the window rather than multiplying, so a three-word note stays a three-word note. Click to select, Ctrl/Shift+click or Ctrl+A for more than one, arrow keys to walk the board, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+X/Delete to act on what is selected.
• Text and images, and nothing else. Text, where a link on its own shows as a chip you can open and a link inside prose opens with Ctrl+click; and images: PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG and animated GIF. Double-click an image to open it full size.
• Search everything with Ctrl+F: text, links and image filenames. Matches are highlighted where they sit, and All napkins puts the rest back.
• Nothing is deleted on your behalf. Napkins you have not touched in 30 days move to an Older section. Clean up moves them to the trash only when you ask, and it can be undone. Pin keeps a napkin at the top; Keep means Clean up never touches it.
• Deleting is always recoverable. A deleted napkin, or items deleted from one, wait in the trash for 30 days. Both thresholds are yours to change in File → Settings….
• It looks like your desktop. Theme follows the system — and keeps following it while running, not only at startup — or you can pin Light or Dark. Accent colour, typeface and text size are settings too.
• Out of the way, not gone. Optionally keep Napkin in the system tray, so closing the window hides it instead of quitting. Its menu makes a new napkin, or pastes the clipboard onto a new one, in a click.
• Export one napkin or everything to a folder of ordinary files at any time (File → Export this napkin… / Export everything…).

Screens

Privacy

• No account, no sync, no telemetry, and no network access of any kind. The only socket Napkin opens is a local one, so that launching it again raises the window already open.
• Your data lives in ~/.local/share/napkin/napkin/: a SQLite database plus image files. The directory is readable only by you (0700, database 0600), and it is marked so that desktop search (Baloo, Tracker) does not index it.
• Keep is retention, not encryption. There is no at-rest encryption. Anyone who can read your home directory can read what you pasted. A scratch surface will end up holding tokens and passwords, so treat it like one.

Install

Releases publish an AppImage and a Windows zip on the releases page.

Linux:

chmod +x napkin-v*-x86_64.AppImage
./napkin-v*-x86_64.AppImage

Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit): unzip napkin-v*-windows-x64.zip anywhere and run napkin.exe; nothing needs installing. The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will warn the first time — More info → Run anyway. Your napkins are kept in %LOCALAPPDATA%\napkin\napkin, readable only by you, so deleting the unzipped folder does not delete them.

On Arch Linux, build a pacman package from the latest master:

git clone https://github.com/sudomonas/napkin.git
cd napkin/packaging/arch
makepkg -si                      # builds, runs the tests, installs under /usr

Remove it with sudo pacman -R napkin-git.

A Flatpak manifest is in packaging/; it has not been submitted to Flathub yet.

Build from source

Requirements:

• A C++20 compiler. CI builds with GCC 11 (Ubuntu 22.04) and GCC 13 (Ubuntu 24.04).
• CMake 3.24 or newer, and Ninja (recommended)
• Qt 6.5 or newer: Core, Gui, Widgets, Network and Test, plus the qtimageformats and qtsvg plugins at runtime for WebP and SVG
• SQLite 3 with FTS5, 3.31 or newer. CI tests 3.31.1 and 3.37.2 as well as the runner's own.

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel cmake ninja qt6-base qt6-imageformats qt6-svg sqlite

On Debian and Ubuntu, check that your release's Qt is 6.5 or newer; Ubuntu 24.04 ships 6.4, which is too old.

Then:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure
sudo cmake --install build        # or --prefix ~/.local

The test suites need no display: the GUI tests run on Qt's offscreen platform.

Keyboard

On the napkin itself: arrow keys move between cards, Ctrl+A selects every item, Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Delete act on the selection, and Ctrl+Enter or Esc finishes editing. The full list is under Help → Keyboard shortcuts…. Typing on an empty napkin, or double-clicking empty space on one, also starts a note, and right-clicking an item offers Edit, Copy, Cut and Delete.

Known limitations

• There is no global "capture" hotkey yet. It needs the XDG GlobalShortcuts portal and is planned.
• A single napkin holding around a thousand items is slow to open. Typical use (hundreds of napkins, each with up to about a hundred items) meets every performance target in SPEC.md §12.
• macOS is not started. Windows works and passes the full suite in CI, but has had far less real use than Linux.

Design

SPEC.md is the design document and the project's record of decisions, measurements and corrected mistakes. Read it before proposing a feature; §21 is the test every feature has to pass.

License

MIT. The toolbar icons are from Lucide, under the ISC and MIT licences in resources/icons/lucide/LICENSE.